alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?
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I'm working on Solace¹, a programming language that targets JavaScript, but is not a superset, like Typescript. The idea is, to allow zero-runtime-cost safeguards, like Optional Values and Error Unions (syntactically they look like Zig's), decent pattern matching and Traits. There's still a lot of work to do, though, because some of the approaches I went for, don't hold in all cases (generics are tricky).
I had a bunch of extra Fable credits, so I spent about $10k running autoresearch loops on 200 of the top github repos with frontends to try and speed up the frontend performance. I distilled them down into a leaderboard of the most common wins, and built out an autoresearch loop that takes those learnings and applies them to your repo.
Works with your existing claude/cursor/codex sub in a cute custom TUI.
I just submitted a Show HN for it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49687032
Keel is a productivity app that combines todo lists, pomodoro, and an AI executive coach to let users go through a whole plan > execute > reflect cycle in the app. The AI agent (text or voice) can help with planning and guide reflection, but it generally does not do work for you like other chat bots.
The android app is in beta now and the iOS app is in development.
I'm decompiling an obscure 1998 computer game using an LLM agent skill that I'm simultaneously developing from papers and books on reverse-engineering (a subject I've never previously engaged with) with the aim of migrating it (well, at least its assets) to the browser: https://esoteria.pages.dev
Here's the skill: https://github.com/gavmor/x86-cpp-reversing-skill
It's all slop, but it's battle-tested and producing results. It's quite fun and inspiring to see some of these assets like textures and geometry that are improperly decompiled, bit shifted or something like that. produces a lot of abstract, glitchy art.
To make sure that my process and results are reproducible, I've gotten back into maintaining Concourse CI pipelines. They were very useful when we were shipping a fork of k8s for VMware, and now they are a fun way of shipping cyberpunk billboard sprites to Cloudflare buckets.
I got back into Concourse in order to attempt a more rigorous approach to generative AI experimentation as well. Unfortunately, there are just so many odd techniques, configurations, loras, and utilities striking my fancy that my experiment pipelines have exploded into the dozens, and Concourse is not a large enough or a high-level enough organizing principle.
I've been working on a collection of native AI/ML operators for TouchDesigner on macOS. Think of it as a happy marriage between the interface of TouchDesigner but with some of the features you know from ComfyUI.
https://www.patreon.com/MickeyvanOlst/posts/meet-aml-macos-1...
Typically TD for the Mac has always been a bit underserved, by leaning into some of the frameworks that exclusively exist on macOS I'm hoping more people will see it as a viable platform for this kind of stuff.
I've been working on a typed, functional-imperative, full stack programming language with IDE support: https://www.firefly-lang.org/
Because my work life is mostly LLM promoting, I’ve gotten back into hobby robotics, which I think has a low chance of LLMs taking over anytime soon. Designing and building a robot that can build a wooden hardwood deck using the edge-screw method.
A new UI library made with zero dependencies (native web components). I just made it public as I actually use it for my personal projects since past year.
The core principle is to help with UI development without bloating a project. It works with vue/nuxt (tested, my projects are done with it), but also react/angular/svelte/etc.
One feedback I got from reddit (I published it this week there) is that AGPLv3 may be a problem for adoption... still not sure if should I use MIT.
A few side projects!
- an open source AES67 hardware receiver/decoder - based on my friend Jessie's work [0]. I want speakers to have ethernet ports and to use an open/inexpensive stack. it's hard because physics/timing are brutal (1ms sync is ~not enough), but that's what makes it a great problem.
- an open source embroidery machine - based on my friend Owen's work [1]. Owen found Brother PE-150 machines which are readily available on eBay for ~$100 as they only work with proprietary 90s-era CF cards which nobody has (or sell for more than the machine). he designed a replacement motherboard (!!) and is running a fully open stack. it's wild.
- a ~$20 tiny cute display you can have on the side of your monitor, and display things on - realtime airport view from flightaware? a mini terminal? you can grab a display today [2], all that's missing is a 3d case (email me for firmware/OS code! I'll share it, just haven't had time). friends Frank and Sophie are working on a similar GUD-compatible display as well! [3]
- my friend Antoine has been working on Python bindings to Canonical's dqlite, a distributed sqlite-variant with raft-based failover and transactions (only C and Go clients existed) [4] - this will soon be a structural ("load-bearing"! haha!) part of Disco, a project we've been working on for a few years which lets you run your own PaaS. we're growing and get nice love letters [5] which for an open source project is obviously deeply rewarding
[0] https://jessie.grosen.systems/projects/aes67-receiver
[1] https://owentrueblood.com/blog/2024/12/10/reverse-engineerin...
[2] https://www.waveshare.com/rp2040-touch-lcd-1.69.htm
[3] https://bsky.app/profile/sophie.engineering/post/3muxysxhpck...
I have been working on cost models and coupon ladders for businesses.
If either of those are interesting to you, please reach out!
For example, I am helping some restaurants learn exactly how much each item on the menu costs, what the margins are, and how much profit each dish is bringing in because I integrate with their PoS system.
It's all a part of GetSetReply which is turning into a small suite of tools for SMBs
I worked on my AI agent that feels like a unix util. This month I changed the way it writes and edits files
All in one platform for hosting agents
- Minimal setup - Any agent harness - A session is an actor - Opinionated infrastructure - Performance on the critical path
Just started:
1) bad apple on my kernel (OS)
2) language model + inference engine from scratch
3) sketchdaily.net, but you give it your own pinterest board of references instead of the preselected ones they have
a replacement for Octopus deploy https://rolloutrhino.com/ (marketing page is mostly a placeholder). Octopus is super expensive for our company and scales poorly if you have lots of small projects. I've got pretty much everything working really well, and the main thing I'm working on is improving the UX for all the workflows I do most often. It is mostly built around what I wanted from the tool, but before I release it I'm looking at supporting various other ways people use the tool. It's been a fun project so far.
I'm learning on how to move away from computing into violin making and repairs.
Building https://typequicker.com
It's a personalized & data-driven typing application that targets your weak points
Web bluetooth for ios (via safari extension). It's already way better than any 3rd party browser available in appstore.
Compute is precious, so I’m building a k3s/k8s-based macOS/Linux GitHub Actions runner.
I’m spending like $25/mo at least in GHA minutes.
Then working on securing and tinkering with my homelab. And little utilities that make repeated deterministic functions easier for me and agents.
Online container planner in 3d
I got laid off at the beginning of last month so put a little time into some personal projects I thought might be fun.
https://dstld.news - I have always wanted a personalized news site so I built one using a few news APIs with AI summaries.
https://hn.wreet.xyz - I'm a big fan of skeleton.dev and wanted a HN frontend with all the fun themes.
Nothing too exciting, just trying to find the joy in making again.
I'm trying to build a tool site that has all the tools you'll ever need. I slowly add some each week.
I am working on a code forge that can work offline for the collaborative stuff. https://juju.bi
An analytics store for Postgres on S3 using DuckDB as the query engine
Still hacking away on Raygum - a nice place to keep your music brain.
I don't even know what that means.
I spent some with reverse-engineering a neural network accelerator (NNA) inside a Chinese WiFi camera SoC: https://github.com/inoop/t41-pluto. I used Claude to reverse-engineer the hardware, and then implement an ONNX compiler and runtime so I can run my own models. Basically I now have a $20 AI smart camera.
Contributing larger PRs to terraform-provider-aws because apparently my contributions so far do not have enough lines of code as a metric. Getting familiar with Floci for usage with Terraform over LocalStack since it is a true open source project rather than freemium. Also getting my AAS from Maestro. Ride or die since I can not afford college anywhere else despite their current accreditation issues with COE.
I've been working on https://pronto.stream/, I wanted to mess around with MCP and building a world news system to power the decision making and surveillance of other systems I would likely curate.
I was curious about formats more efficient for agent communication than JSON and also proving if the framework I curated could handle the load and traffic.
It's been really fun to observe.
I’m working on a 52-part series about retention.
Each week I research one part of retention, teach it, and apply it to two real-world products I built.
I’ve published five lectures so far, and think the series should be useful to anyone here building a product: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFp5nmjrQeug
I'm building editor and flasher for BMW engines maps (n13, n20, n55, s55, b58, s58) and TCU maps (ZF8HP45 and ZF8HP50) as well as a remote access ENET IOS and Android app.
I am building OtaKit.app, a cheap, fast, and simple CDN-based over-the-air updating tool for Capacitor apps (and soon for React Native too)
A local AI-adoption consultancy business for SMBs where the differentiator is I physically show up at your office and actually talk to your team. With the slopification of cold outreach and social posting, I think the future of business development is going to be very personal.
we are building https://www.d5s.tech, using our own software to automate our own company (the boring bits)! having a blast doing it and steadily automating more and more
and... whenever i have some spare gpt-6 astra left i am working on a R.U.S.E reimplementation alongside some other threejs experiments
I haven't been working on it as of late, mostly because i'm a bit deflated from software in general, but I started working on a programming language I called Grasp.
If lisp is a list processing language, grasp is a graph programming language.
The idea was that most other data structures can be represented with a graph ( adjacency matrices are matrices, a tree is a type of directed acyclic graph, a list is a graph where each node connects to at most two nodes, etc) and so if you designed a programming language where the language is itself a graph, much like how lisp is itself a list, you could get other esoteric programming languages like APL, forth, lisp, and so on as DSLs of Grasp. Also any program you write would be its own CFG.
I started it but honestly its mostly a hot mess of vibe-coded garbage. But I may get back on it and try to clean it up.
I've been working on https://searchforjobs.app/ I'm trying to add the resume creator for using the right keywords for a job posting. I'm also trying to add more data visualizations are more job posting sources to scrape.
I'm further along in my funemployment project:
https://github.com/mcdirmid/cleanroom
So far I have bazel macros up that can produce tested code with a ~30GB MoE model (Jundot/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-oQ6-mtp, I can get ~90 toks/sec on a M3 Max!) using cleanroom separate implementation and test development (and then comparing them until both are correct). Over the last month, however, I found that my bottleneck is in the specifications: as I further divided my components into separate parts (since smaller components are easier to write and test), I started hitting problems with specifications becoming badly ungrounded (code depending on knowledge they cannot access, so something is just hallucinated).
So I redid the format, e.g.
https://github.com/mcdirmid/cleanroom/blob/main/update_with_...
The spec format is designed to be declarative and very modular, and ya, an LLM is primarily writing the specs as well, so I hope to create some sort of formal reasoning framework that the specification can be translated into (by an LLM) so that ungroundness feedback can help the LLM write better specs. Also, I found that it really is much more robust to change/refactor/add features via the spec first and then align changes down to test and code, then to make changes to the code directly (even without using the system, just asking a frontier model to look at the guides and do the alignment itself directly).
I think I'll be ready to do a release over this next month, which means:
- Supporting a build system other than Bazel to express DAGs. Honestly, this could be anything, I just chose Bazel for convenience (easy to express graphs in Starlark), but it assumes a monorepo world that I don't think many developers use.
- How do I even package this? The advance of using Starlark is that I can generate python code to call into the generated python code directly. If I move away from that, I need to figure out what this really looks like as a binary.
- More demos. Right now my only project is the code for the system itself (the classic "the first program of a language is the compiler for the language"). I just can't think of many interesting things to do in Python that aren't agent related (I can support other languages, like Java, Typescript, or even C++, but I'm hitting choice paralysis).
Build one of the best emoji sites there is.
An Openclaw, Hermes Agent type system that is meant to be ran on a home server, built in Rails with a Tauri 2 front-end.
- i dropped a neural net jane street puzzle (https://huggingface.co/spaces/jane-street/droppedaneuralnet) very good mindbreaker, learned a lot of new things on the way
RSS Bot for Telegram: learns what you like, searchable, using free models (vibe-coded): https://github.com/amb007/rss-bot
The 2026-27 soccer season just started.
If you love catching up on highlights, check https://thepelota.tv/
It’s like Netflix but for soccer highlights, with all the major leagues in one place as soon as they are available on YouTube, all free and no ads.
Don, a work companion.
Don helps you set goals.
Don reminds you to take breaks.
Don checks in how you fell.
Don judges you when you go off track.
Don celebrates you when you get stuff done.
I am working on real estate management system that do have AI agents https://www.aqaris.ae/. I want to automate mundane day-to-day tasks so managers can have more time
I'm working on SpecPilot (https://specpilot.dev), a spec-driven development layer that sits in front of Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot and the rest. It deliberately doesn't generate code. It scaffolds a .specs/ folder and hands the actual writing off to whatever agent you already use, so the specs become the thing the agent is held to instead of a prompt you retype every session.
Open source, free, no login, nothing to sell. I'm not trying to build a business on this. I just want agents to write better code, and that only happens when they have something firmer than a chat prompt to work against. CLI is here: https://github.com/girishr/SpecPilot
It started as a TypeScript CLI in January. Enough people told me they either didn't want a CLI or didn't know how to use one that I rebuilt the front door as a guided chat: 27 questions, runs fully offline in the browser, outputs the .specs/ tree plus an onboarding prompt for your IDE.
Recently shipped an MCP server so the agent can run the questionnaire itself rather than the human doing it, published to the official MCP registry and Smithery. Next is brownfield: point it at an existing repo and backfill specs from the code. Honest state of things: the Product Hunt launch got 4 votes and around 100 visitors, and I had no event tracking wired up, so I couldn't even tell how many of those generated anything. Fixed since. Usage is small but real, and it's coming through MCP rather than the web app, which I did not expect.
The part I keep circling back to is that spec generation is easy to copy. Spec enforcement is where the value is: checking a diff against the spec and failing loudly. Feedback welcome, especially from anyone who tried SDD on an existing codebase and gave up.
I just released an open-source AI pipeline that turns GitHub issues into merged PR's. It uses your Claude Code CLI subscription.
Looking for feedback from people who already run Claude Code and are testing out new AI software factories or tools.
Try it here https://github.com/Team1-dev/Team1-Factory
Please only run this on a VPS or isolated environment and not on your personal machine as it runs with full permissions.
i am working on a really cool word game that has a TUI graphical style, it looks like a roguelike but has a bit more going on. i also seem to have figured out a way to do automated "fun factor" testing and get bugs/frs that sound like real player feedback, as a little bonus treat. doesn't seem like anybody is attempting that kind of thing with agents, might try to codify it. trying to spend a lot longer thinking about a game's systems/meta and developing slowly vs. hypersprinting which is fun but exhausting.
Optimem, a spaced repetition learning app that aims to be a user-friendly alternative to Anki. Or a more effective version of Duolingo.
Writing an article about compacting garbage collection for my website.
https://Webvetted.com
It’s an AI Private Investigator that does the hard work of data gathering (using Open Source Intelligence) and correlation. Used by over 70k investigators including government agencies.